Overview of Search

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Search lets you find resources in your tenancy without requiring you to navigate through different services and compartments. You do not need to know the compartment or availability domain where a resource exists in order to locate and view its details. Rather, with a query, you can use as little as a single piece of information, such as the creation date or other supported attribute, to find a resource. Querying also helps you avoid the latency associated with loading a long list of results onto a single page or the inconvenience of viewing a long list that spans multiple pages.

You might find it helpful to use Search to find related resources when creating or deleting another resource. For example, you might want to find what compartments already exist before creating a new one because compartments cannot be deleted. Or, if you want to delete a volume, you can use a query to verify that a backup exists.

Another benefit of Search is that you can find resources that require action. For example, you might want to delete terminated block volumes because you no longer need them and don’t want them to count against your service limits. Or, you can search for all resources that match a specific naming scheme, in case you want to act on a category of associated resources. Sometimes, resources in a specific lifecycle state, such as databases in a failed state, require troubleshooting. With Search, you can quickly identify those resources and resolve problems.

Supported Resources

Search supports queries for the following Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and resources. This table will be updated as query support is added for more resources.

Although you can use the query language to search fields and values for any supported attribute, query results only provide information about the following resource attributes:

Resource type

Oracle Cloud Identifier (OCID)

Compartment

Availability domain

Display name

Creation date and time

Lifecycle state

Tags (visible in the API only)

The preceding attributes are common to most Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Their meaning is consistent across resource types. Query results do not contain information specific to any resource type. For example, you can query for volumes of a certain size, but search results will not display the Size attribute. You must view the details of a resource to see resource-specific information.

Tip

If you use the Console, neither query results nor resource details will include either defined tags or free-form tags, due to display constraints. Any given resource might contain hundreds of tags. If you want to see tags, use the API to view resource details.

Required IAM Permissions

The resources that you see in query results depend on the permissions you have in place for the resource type. You do not necessarily see results for everything in the compartment or tenancy. For example, if your user account is not associated with a policy that grants you the ability to, at a minimum, inspect the dbsystem resource type, then you can’t query for DB systems. (The verb inspect lets you list and get resources.) Instead, Search will show no results for queries of DB system resources. For more information about policies, see How Policies Work. For information about the specific permissions required for the list API operation for your desired resource type, see the Policy Reference for the appropriate service.